Fear in a Handful of Dust
by Butterflies in Glass
Summary: AU: Just because he spent three months in cave doesn't mean he's damaged. A few nightmares don't warrant the need for psychotropic drugs or therapy, and his age shouldn't come into question. And since he sees this, why can't anyone else? Tony Stark deals with the repercussions of PTSD during his first semester of college. Title stolen from Eliot's "The Waste Land."
1. Waking Up

**Important:** Okay, so, this is a college AU, but not exactly a normal one. This isn't much of a spoiler since it opens up with it, but the whole Tony-gets-kidnapped happens right before he went to college, which means his parents are still alive. The beginning has a weird amount of focus on that, I'll admit. And not all the Avengers are going to be the same age, so just so I don't get any PMs about where someone is, I'll just quick go over it now:

Steve: Howard's friend, married to Peggy (the poor guy deserves it), on-leave soldier

Bruce: MIT professor, dating Betty, friends with Howard

Clint & Natasha: Tony's friends, going into college

Thor & Loki: um, still trying to figure this one out, probably college students

Eventual pairing with either be Tony/Natasha or Tony/Clint...Give me your opinions. I'll make a tally.

Also, so ARC reactor in Tony's chest since there's no superhero aspect in it. And a sort of different coming home receptions since he's a minor with parents.

Anyway, disclaimer: don't own the characters.

.

**Waking Up**

The first thing Tony became aware of was the talking. The _angry _talking.

"Doctor Yelin, really," said a familiar voice as he forced open his eyes. The room was bright—a hospital one, obvious—and he quickly shut them again. "It's been two days. I want to see him."

It took a moment, but suddenly the familiar voice clicked into place and he realized his dad was talking. His dad. They might not see each other a lot, but the fact that he needed to think about that for even a second was still enough to start the slow beginnings of a panic attack. Then another, definitely unfamiliar voice answered, "We don't know his mental state yet. It's not a good idea," and the anxiety stopped because it meant he was back, it worked, and that he must be really fucked up not have noticed it from the off-white hospital ceiling alone.

"He's my son. That has to mean something." He opened his eyes again, fighting through the pain of the brightness, and forced himself to sit up. His entire body protested, but he didn't care because by this point, he'd been through a lot worse than a sluggish mind and aching body. Through the thin slate of glass in the door, he can see two shadows. "Do you really think he'd rather wake up to a doctor he doesn't know?"

"Mr. Stark, he'll just be getting off of sedation. He might not even recognize you."

Though he sounded hoarse, and he wasn't very loud, he managed to force out, "Dad?"

The shadows stalled their movement and something was mumbled that he didn't hear well enough to understand before the door opened. His dad stood there, a scowling doctor behind him, and though there were about five people he should want to be with first thing after waking up more than the father he never sees, the relief that flooded through him was so strong that he could've cried. After the doctors told them they have fifteen minutes, his dad pulled up a chair and a heartbeat of silenced passed.

Then he said, "Hi," because geniuses weren't known for being particularly smart in the people department, and next thing he knew, he was wrapped up in the most awkwardly necessary hug of his life.

"I'm so sorry, Tony," his dad said, and though he was sure there had to be a reason for the apology, his brain still wasn't working right for him to figure it out. "You just—God, I can't even imagine, I was so scared—"

"Y-yeah," he answered, tripping over his words because he mouth was dry and he was having trouble doing anything normal. "H-how long was I g-gone, Dad?"

His dad was crying; his shoulders were shaking. Tony had never seen either of his parents cry before, even his mom after Grandma died. "Three months," his dad said, voice surprisingly even. "It's the middle of July. I found you two days ago."

The middle of July. Somehow, it felt longer and he thought it was a shorter. Apparently they vastly underestimated him—he could've made that weapon in a week, not three months, though he isn't complaining because that was the only thing that kept him alive. He pulled out of the hug, the uncomfortable way he was twisted becoming painful, and looked down at the coarse hospital blanket, playing with a loose string. Now that the thought of time span had entered his head, he really wanted to go home.

"Where's M-Mom?" he asked because after all the shit he went through, all wanted to do see his parents, even if logic told him that he was with his friends a thousand times more than he was with them so this made no sense.

His dad answered, "We aren't in America right now, Tony. You're at the nearest military base. What with the current situation here and all, both of us coming didn't seem like a good idea. Just in case something…happened."

_Not in America. _So he was safe but he wasn't home, and he should've known that because why would they fly him hours away with God knows how many injuries? Injuries. Oh, right. That was why his body hurt so bad. Internal damage inevitably, maybe even permanent to his lungs, knife marks, crude stitching—

He broke off the thought line there, not wanting the heart monitor's beep to speed up and give the doctor an excuse to come back in and shoo his dad away. Instead he said, "Okay. W-when can I go ho-home? Why ca-can't I th-think straight?"

"Hopefully tomorrow we'll be able to transfer you to an America hospital," he said. Without looking, he knew the crying had stopped. "Travelling will be hard, but I'm sure you just want to get back to New York, don't you?" He nodded, which made him feel lightheaded, but sitting up felt too good to lie back down again. "Thought so. And you woke up about twelve hours ago, so they gave you a sedative. The effects should be wearing off now."

"They f-fixed me, right?" he said and realized vaguely for the first time that he and his dad pronounced words the same way.

"Your chest?" Again, he nodded, though he actually meant his everything. "Yes. It'll bother you for a while, though. You're going to be subscribed Vicodin."

As someone who had been on Vicodin before, he wasn't looking forward to doing so again. His thoughts hit about as much blockage as it did now.

"D-Dad?" he said.

"Yeah, Tony?"

"I'm tired."

His dad stood. "I'll get the doctor," he said, leaning down and giving Tony a kiss on his head. "I'll come back when you wake up. I love you, Tony."

Though he was caught off guard, he answered, "I l-love you too, Dad."

Because at a moment like what, what else could he say?

.

Two days later and he was back on American soil, half asleep and clinging to his dad's arm because even on a probably too-high dose of Vicodin for his body size, walking down stairs hurt like a bitch. Somehow, there wasn't the clicking of cameras everywhere but there was his mom, and she rushed forward before he could walk more than a foot on solid ground. His parents exchanged a look and rather than get enveloped in another hug, she moved some hair from his face.

"Oh, Tony," she said and her hand was shaking. "I'm so sorry I couldn't be there. Your father and I thought…Well, that's not important. You probably want to sit down."

He nodded, dazed and tired and a little lightheaded again. Probably because he'd barely eaten anything in a really long time and over the past couple of days, he couldn't even look at food without feeling a sick. Effects of the painkiller, he was guessing. For some reason he wanted to apologize for talking, but that took talking too, and he simply didn't have the energy for it.

His mom reached over to take his hand, which his remaining cognitive function told him he should mind but didn't anyway. Gently, he was lead to the awaiting car and slid into the middle seat next to her, in between his parents. After ten minutes of sitting silently, letting his mom ramble on uninterrupted about how she wishes she had been there earlier, how sorry she is, how much she loves him, his succumbed to the natural side effects of the medication, and fell asleep again, slumped against his dad's side.

Time passed, and he woke up to the sound of voices again, this time considerably closer, but he was still too exhausted to move or talk or open to his eyes. He was lying on something comfortable that he could only assume was his bed, and he could feel his mom's fingers running this through his hair, so he couldn't have been here long.

"They honestly put him on a dose that high?" she said. "What were they _thinking_? Especially since he—God, Howard, how much weight did he lose?"

"Eighteen pounds," his dad answered. "And I agree, but I can take him off it tomorrow. The lowered appetite is worse than the pain."

"Why didn't Obadiah tell us? And why didn't we—this is all our fault."

"I know, Maria. I know."

A short silence. Then, "He's fifteen, Howard. How's he going to recover this?"

His dad sighed. "A lot of therapy, and probably some medication, too." The fingers stopped, and her hand left his hair. "And I don't know how much that'll do. As if his anxiety wasn't enough."

His parents knew about that? Tony always assumed they were clueless. How much else did they know?

"He's supposed to go to school this September. Should we let him?"

"September is a month and a half away. I guess we'll figure it out when the time comes."

He opened his eyes finally, expecting darkness and instead finding sunlight pouring through his window. His body felt heavy and his brain wasn't working and he wondered why the hell people bothered doing drugs if this was the effect. He was lying on his side with the comforter pulled up to about his waist and the air conditioning was blasting. Since his mouth felt way too dry to talk and his mom's arm was right next to his hand, he tugged on the sleeve of her cardigan to get her attention.

She jumped and looked over, surprise on her face melting into relief. "Hey, sweetie," she said with a small smile. "Do you need anything?"

"Thirsty," he mumbled, now slurring rather than stuttering, feeling stupid that his verbal ability seemed to have been boiled down to the usage of a single word at a time.

His dad stood up, and though he lost sight of him for a moment, he heard the sound of the mini-fridge on the other side of the room being opened. "How're you feeling?" his mom asked as he struggled to sit up because drinking while lying down never turned out well. An open water bottle was placed in his hand (he knew he had those in there for a reason) and after the first sip, he already felt better, even if his throat apparently still hated him.

"Better," he answered, trying to clear his head and failing. Roughly a year ago he was on the same thing for a broken wrist, but it hadn't been this bad.

"That's good," she said, and his dad took a seat next her. For someone who barely slept, this utter exhaustion was possibly harder to deal with than anything else. "Are you hungry?"

Oh God, food. Even if he knew the curbed appetite was a side effect of the medication and that his body needed nutrients to function, he couldn't stand the thought of eating and shook his head.

"Does anywhere hurt?" his dad asked. Again, Tony shook his head. "Good to hear. Do you want to go back to sleep?"

Yeah, he thought, yeah, he does. Unfortunately, this would probably cover his sleeping quota for the rest of the year, but maybe that could be a good thing. At the moment the medication was probably blocking out nightmares, but that wouldn't last forever.

"I'll hurt tomorrow, won't it?" he said, rubbing his eye.

"Yes," his mom answered. "But you'll be able to eat and move around, too."

"Okay." It was a lame response but he didn't care, and took another sip of water. "Do I really have to go to therapy?"

"You were awake for that?" his dad said as he put the water bottle on the end table. "Well, yes, but we'll talk about that…later."

"You mean when I can think?"

"That's right."

"Can I go back to sleep?"

His mom smiled at him, and said, "Of course, honey. One of us will check in on you in a few hours, okay?"

He lay back down without answering, because even three minutes of talking was too much effort, and pulled up the comforter. By this point he was very used to heat and though the air conditioning was most likely set for around seventy, it felt freezing. Heat rises, but getting stuck in a desert cave with a fire going most of the time was on average around a hundred degrees already. Almost immediately he started falling back to sleep, and one of his parents kissed his forehead again before they left.

The door clicked shut behind them.

.

Though his body was on fire from recovering gunshot wounds, knife marks, and internal scarring from once badly removed shrapnel and repeated drowning, he managed to pull himself out of his bed and out into the living room, where he found his dad sitting in an armchair reading.

"I'm hungry," he said as his dad looked up, putting the book down on the coffee table. "Where's Mom?"

"In the kitchen," he answered, and stood. Tony slumped against the doorframe, trying not to show how out of breath he was from that short trip. Survival instinct and a project kept him going for the past three months, but after nearly dying during an escape attempt, losing his friend, going through hours of surgery, and being put on and off painkillers, he couldn't quite do it anymore. Finally, he was home and it just didn't seem worth it anymore. "Sit over here. I'll tell her to make you something."

He nodded and forced himself to move again long enough to flop on the couch, feeling more useless than he ever had in his life. His dad disappeared into the kitchen and a moment later came back. "She said she'll make you scrambled eggs," he said, and resumed his position on the armchair. "You don't have to eat all of it."

Scrambled eggs wasn't something Tony normally had. Like his dad, he couldn't cook for shit even if he could read a recipe fine and measure better than most professionals. Somehow, he always managed to screw up and usually just lived off microwaveable food.

"Okay," he said, trying to ignore how difficult breathing was and wondering if that doctor on the military base screwed up somehow and left some type of medical equipment inside of him. Stuff like that happened all the time. "Hey, Dad?"

"Hm?"

"How widely publicized was this?"

Before his dad can answer, his mom came in, carrying a plate of scrambled eggs in one hand and a glass of water in the other, putting them in front of him on the coffee table. As he gave the instinctive, "Thank you," his father said, "Not as much as you'd expect since you're a minor. We knew you weren't in America, so we could avoid Amber Alert, but Natasha and Clint do, and the Rodgers know by default, as well as Rhodey and Obadiah."

As long as the entire world didn't know, he was fine with anything. The last thing he needed was to finally get healthy and then stared at whenever he felt like leaving his house. "Okay," he repeated and picked up the plate and fork. Now that the thought of eating didn't make him sick, actual food tasted amazing.

"Tony," his mom asked as she sat down next to him, "are there any foods I should avoid for a while?"

"Crackers and green beans," he answered without having to think about it. After a moment of hesitation, he added, "Can I go use my lab? I came up with an idea for something."

His dad smiled with something that looked like affection and said, "Just keep the door open and stay seated as much as you can, okay?"

He nodded and stood, steadying him quickly before he could fall backwards like an idiot and shoot his chances of being able to leave. For the past three months he'd been working on the idea, but since his sample ran out of battery, he'd have to make it from scratch, though with actual lab equipment that wasn't saying much. Then he made his way along, using the wall as support once he was out of eyeshot, and reached the room in twice the amount of time as it should have.

.

If you don't find this so incredibly strange that you couldn't like it, review please. They're good motivators. ^^


	2. Artificial Sky

Thank you so much for the reviews, everyone! I was so scared no one was going to read it because it's just another college AU, so I must say, I'm pleasantly surprised. ^^ Also, I have two votes down for Tony/Clint.

Disclaimer: don't own the characters.

.

**Artificial Sky**

A few days after his first therapy appointment (that he was vehemently against but forced to go to anyway), he was deemed well enough to interact with people other than doctors and his parents. He grabbed at the opportunity immediately and met up with his friends in the diner down the street.

"Hi," he said as he sat down next to Clint, pretending not to see the second of surprise on Natasha's face when he pulled up the sleeve of his shirt to fit on his shoulder. Though he'd gained back two pounds since he'd gotten back, that was still a sixteen pound difference from the last time he wore this shirt. "What's up?"

"Talking about the apartment," Clint answered, clicking his phone so the Safari page disappeared. "You know, just got down to doing it now."

It took him a moment to find the date in his head, but after a moment he said, "It's the twenty-fourth, isn't it?"

"Yup."  
"And you turned eighteen yesterday."

"Mhm-hm."

Considering that Tony tended forget birthdays (including his own on a few occasions), this shouldn't have been all that unnerving, but it was anyway. He'd completely forgotten about the apartment-rather-than-dorm plan, too, since at fifteen he was too young to legally be in a dorm room at MIT and Clint and Natasha were both going to school in that general area too. Apparently it had also slipped his mind that he made a point to remember his friend's birthday this year since he was the oldest and there had to be someone at least eighteen to actually put a lease down on the place. He was the youngest by about two years and Natasha's birthday wasn't until the end of October. Naturally his two friends happened to be one with a summer birthday and another to barely make the cutoff date.

"Happy birthday," he said.

As Clint answered, "Thanks," Natasha asked, "How're you feeling?"

"What?" Then he realized that even though it'd been a week, he still looked like hell, and probably a little whacked out too. Today was his first day on Buspar and fluoxetine and since they weren't fully kicked in yet, his pupils were enormous. Though he hated being put on medication, he conveniently had a flashback a few hours before his first psychiatry appointment after waking up from a nightmare and the doctor declared the suppressing it as quickly as possible was "imperative" for some reason he didn't get the chance to overhear. "Oh, yeah. I'm okay. I was going to call you earlier, but I had to reconnect my cell phone. It sort of got broken."

He knew he was talking about this way too calmly to be considered normal, but despite the nightmares, flashback, and couple of anxiety attacks, he'd been trying his hardest to compartmentalize, make this less important than anything else until the hypothetical day he would need it (which would be never). It was proving more difficult than he expected.

Before either of his friends could say anything, a waitress he vaguely recognized as being the bad cashier from the Starbucks a few blocks over came over. "Hello, and welcome to The Flame," she said, taking out a notepad from the pocket of her apron. "I'm Laura, I'll be your server today. Do you know what you want to order?"

"Ham and cheese sandwich and a coffee, " Clint answered and Tony remembered with a certain amount of sadness that he wasn't allowed caffeine until the meds kicked it—and even then, there was only a fifty-fifty chance.

"Make that a second coffee," Natasha said, "and and toasted bagel with butter, please."

Feeling inexplicably awkward, he finished, "Another bagel and water."

"Two coffees, two bagels with butter, and ham and cheese sandwich, and water." A universal nod. "Okay, your breakfast will be here shortly."

After she'd collected the menus and left, Clint asked, "Can't eat?"

"Not really," he said, and wished that his friends didn't look so sympathetic. Part of compartmentalizing was allowing himself to not think about it again, which was the only reason why he didn't absolutely refuse the medication, so hopefully he'd be able to just get it all out and by the time September second came by, he'd never have to talk about it outside the inevitable therapy sessions ever again. "Not allowed to drink coffee or Coke or anything for a while either."

"That sucks," Natasha said. "How are you possibly going to survive morning classes now?"

Tony runs his fingers through his hair. "Don't remind me," he said. "And I was hoping on taking twenty-one credits the first semester."

This wasn't followed up by any _you're insane_ comment, which he both appreciated and was irked by at the same time. Despite the situation, he wanted everything to be as normal as he could pull off at the moment, and the two of them poking fun of his slightly "mad" genius fell neatly into category. Though maybe that didn't make sense anymore because in accordance to the way every medical professional was treating him, being declared completely crazy was a step away from actually happening.

Instead, Clint said, exasperated, "Maybe you should take it easy the first semester. I mean, you took thirteen AP tests—don't you count as a second semester sophomore anyway?"

He shrugged. "Yeah. So?"

"You don't need to finish school in like a year, Tony," Natasha said doubtfully. "I thought you couldn't legally invent for Stark Industries until you were eighteen anyway."

He said, "I guess," without much agreement really behind it and thought, _I wonder if my parents will let me go abroad next year. _And if he'd still want to. To stop her from looking at him so warily, he continued, "I don't know if MIT will let me regardless. I think they only let me in this early is because I'm a Stark."

The relief was a little insulting, but he let it slid. Considering that the two of them were pretty much his only friends he'd ever had that were actual human beings, worry was going to be unavoidable. And when he thought about it logically, he could understand, and that they had right to be, whether they knew it or not. But even if they did know it, he wasn't prepared to tell anyone the shit he went through. Both his parents knew the physical things because medical practices were advanced enough now that they could see evidence everywhere. But hell if he was telling them that the only reason he escaped was because the most idiotically noble man he'd ever met sacrificed himself so a kid with no social skills, familial issues, and horrendously lower chance of survival could keep going, only to inevit—

He cut the thought off there before it could turn into a tangent and Clint said, "And that you can probably talk circles around the professors anyway. I can't wait to get to Suffolk. I'm officially sick of New York."

Laura the Ex-Starbucks Cashier came over, putting their breakfasts in front of them and walked away before any of them could give the mandatory thanks. "Same with Emerson," said Natasha after a short, slightly surprised silence. "I think I would've gone crazy if I'd ended up in a New York school."

"I didn't apply anywhere else."

"Yeah, well, why'd you need a safety school?"

For the first time since waking up in the military base, Tony started to feel his life at least trying to fit back into place. He was talking about college with his friends, there was a bagel in front of him from the only diner he bothered eating at, and he had two connected projects going on at home, one of which he'd hopefully have designed by tomorrow.

"Want to go back to my place?" he said suddenly, not wanting to end this sense of normality so quickly. "Dad's going to be tied up in the lab because of some emergency and mom's actually cooking tonight."

"They won't mind the company?" Natasha asked, and he shook his head. "Well, I'm game then. My mom's decided to make bitsky tonight, and the further away I am from that the better."

"Works for me," Clint said. "You probably can't go far anyway, right?"

He answered, "Unfortunately," and really wished he was allowed to have coffee. Or a soda. "We can try out my new AI to look for apartments, too."

"New AI?"

He nodded. "It's still a prototype, but I want to try installing a personality and everything. Right now it's just a computer command system, though. I've named it JARVIS."

"What does it stand for?" Natasha asked, and finished off her bagel. Tony shrugged. "Oh, naturally. Anyway, we're shooting for Beacon Hill or Cambridge, right?"

Tony smiled and finished his bagel as the subject changed and his friends started arguing about location and thought to himself beyond a doubt for the first time that leaving for college wasn't impossible.

.

Around midnight, a few hours after his friends left, his dad entered his lab, knocking on the doorframe to let him know he was there. Tony had a while before he was allowed to shut doors and even longer before he was allowed to lock anything.

"Come in," he said from his place on the floor, fiddling with the ARC reactor control tablet he finished a few hours ago.

As his dad entered, he asked, "Did you fall asleep on the floor again?"

"No," he answered. "Can't sleep. I don't think the drowsiness side effect kicked in yet, so I'm working. Want to see? You have to lie down, though—I can't seem to get it to work from all angles yet."

A moment later his dad was next to him, which surprisingly wasn't as awkward as he'd expected. He put his finger at the bottom of the tablet screen and slid upwards. When went off the top, the ceiling was suddenly filled in with the image of the night sky. Ever since he'd realized his lab looked almost brown when the lights got dim enough, he'd started making an image to fill it up. He'd missed the sky anyway.

"Impressive," his dad said. "What type of batteries are you using? That might account for the angle issue."

Feeling incredibly proud of himself, he said, "I'm not using batteries. I'm designing a new form of energy, called an ARC reactor. Completely clean and doesn't need to be charged. I'm using it to power an AI too. His name is JARVIS."

"Is he confined to the tablet?"

"No, I'm installing him in all the equipment."

He asked, "How close are you to being finished?"

"Pretty close," he answered. "I just installed the ability to form a personality. Watch—JARVIS, raise brightness of Sirius by ten percent."

"_Sixteen percent would be more realistic, sir._"

"Keep it at ten for now."

As the star brightened, his dad said, "I think he's going to be a worrier."

"Why?"

A shrug. "I don't know," he said. "Just a feeling. You've done this all over the past few days?" Tony nodded. "Promise to correct your MIT professors too much, okay?"

He bit back the temptation to say, "So I can still go?" and instead asked, "Did you used to do that?"

"Oh, yeah," his dad answered. "You remember your grandfather, right?"

"Not really."

"Well, he wasn't like us, Tony. He didn't get it and wasn't around enough to get it." Now that he thought about, he'd never heard his dad talk about his parents. The only memory he had of his grandfather was a scowling old man that looked a little like President McKinley telling his dad off for letting him anywhere near, what he called, all that science stuff. "He thought letting me go off to college at sixteen was going to my head and after he found out I told my physics teacher that he was wrong about quantum mechanics, he said I wasn't as smart as I thought I was and threatened to pull me out of college. But don't worry, I'm not doing that to you. Ever."

In his sophomore year of high school, his Intro to Psych teacher said that a lot of times, a person's parenting style was taken from their own upbringing. Though he'd connected it to his mom, the thought that it worked for his dad too never crossed his mind. After a moment of awkward silence, Tony decided to bite his own pride for once, and said, "Dad, can you help me with the angling problem?"

If given another few hours to himself, he would be able to figure this out on his own. But as he and his dad crunched numbers and theories and lay on the ground with the artificial night sky above them, he wondered if this was what normal families were like.

.

I couldn't possibly write an Avengers story without JARVIS.


	3. Confusion

Hi! Okay, so chapter three. I wrote the majority of this thing after a horrible bout of insomnia that overpowered my sleeping pills, so just give me a heads up if it gets a little...sporadic.

Anyway! I have three votes for Tony/Clint and one for Natasha/Tony/Clint. The latter might be hard, but if enough people want, I can probably pull it off.

Disclaimer: don't own the characters.

.

**Confusion**

Midway through August, Tony experienced the first parental living room discussion of his life. And it was just as horrible as Clint and Natasha described.

"We know, Tony," his mom was saying. "It's just that it's…Well, it's a little soon."

"It'll be six weeks by the time I go!"

His dad pinched the bridge of his nose. "We aren't saying you can't go, Tony," he said. "What we're saying is that we can't release you out on your own when you can barely run more than ten feet without getting winded."

While this was true, he refused to let a little lung scarring get in his way of going off the college. "It's not like I'm going to be living in a dorm," he said. "One of the apartments we looked at is right down the street from MIT and another one's right next to the T on Beacon Hill. Just say which one and I'll tell Clint, I swear."

After his parents shared one of those frustratingly unreadable looks, his dad said, "Steve and Peggy moved to Beacon Hill if he needs adult help. And Bruce lives somewhere in that area—"

"I'll check in with Steve and Peggy once a week or something," he cut in quickly before they could think about it too much, "and I'm probably going to run into Bruce or whatever his girlfriend's name is in school. I won't have to put up with a creepy possible roommate either, 'cause I'll have Clint and Natasha. I'll be fine."

He could see his dad bending, but his mom still looked unsure. "I really don't know," she said. "You don't know Boston the way you do New York, and if that starts stressing you out, Dr. Mira is going to put you on something else, and I thought we were trying to avoid that."

"I'll be fine," he repeated. "And since I'm a minor and everything, you can check on whether or not I'm going to therapy, right?" That wasn't exactly something that he liked, but by this point he was fishing for any reason he could think of. "See, so it's not like I'm going to have any privacy anyway."

"The only way you're going is if we set up some sort of communication," his dad said. "If something goes wrong, you _have _to call us, understand?" He nodded. "Good. And pick up your phone when we call. If you can't, call us back as soon as you're able."

"Howard, you can't be serious."

Before his dad could answer, he said, "I'll do all of that, I promise. And if I can't get in contact with you or something, I'll call another one of your friends who live closer. I'll sleep, too, and avoid caffeine and—"

"You've made your point, Tony," his dad said. "I'm saying you can go, but it's not unconditional. Maria?"

Though she didn't look happy about it, she answered, "Fine. But we're getting another psychological evaluation before you go. Deal?"

"Deal," he agreed because conditional was better than nothing at the moment and fighting wasn't going to help him at the moment. "Now can I go? Because I was in the middle of applying JARVIS and the ARC reactor to my computer."

He stood and looked at the clock above the television. "I have to go to work anyway," he said. "Tony, do me your mom a favor and don't install anything when she needs the electricity."

"Okay," he said, relieved even though it wasn't definite. As long as he didn't have another panic attack (or at least not one they found about), he was going to MIT in two weeks.

"You should go call your friends to let them know," his mom said, still not looking particularly happy. "Remember, Beacon Hill, Tony."

"I know, I know," he said, standing up and backing out of the room as quickly as he could. "Talk to you later."

"Tony—"

He left, pretending he hadn't heard her because even after a month, he wasn't used to the worrying. Then again, despite the possibility of not going to college, he'd rather take the worrying than the constantly trying to get their attention. Though he would never admit it to anyone, and barely admitted it to himself, they somehow made dealing with it easier.

When he reached his room, he went straight into his lab and said, "JARVIS, call Clint."

"_Cell phone or home, sir_?"

"Assume cell unless I ever specify otherwise," he answered, and a moment later his cell phone started ringing. He turned on his computer as the line clicked open and said, "Hey, so my parents and I were talking and they said we should try for Beacon Hill."

"_No hi, how are you? You make me feel unloved, Tony_." In the background he could hear the carnival music from _Left 4 Dead 2. _

"Sorry about that," he said. "Should we get Natasha online?"

"_Sure. Switch to video chat_?"

With a small smile, he said, "Works for me," because doing any changes was an excuse to use the AI and he wanted to make sure he'd rigged up everything correctly. "JARVIS, activate video chat on Comp. Two, and get Natasha online."

His computer beeped, and the call transferred, the real-time image of Clint with an Xbox controller in one hand popping up to one side with Natasha's blank square on the other. When her video clicked on, her hair was a wreck and clothes rumbled. "Assholes," she said, covering her mouth with her elbow as she yawned. "You guys woke me up. This better be important."

"It's about the apartment," Tony answered. "We decided on that one on Beacon Hill. JARVIS, is anything at risk from the ARC?"

"_Everything is operational and shows no signs of changing._"

Though she still looked exhausted, Natasha's face lit up at the sound of his AI's voice. "You didn't tell me he had a British accent," she said.

"_There's no such thing a 'British' accent, Miss Romanoff. My inflections match that of Bristol, England._"

The end level music played from Clint's square and he focused his attention back. "JARVIS can hear us?" he asked. "How?"

"You're essentially on speaker phone," he pointed out. "Anyway, about that apartment. Is Beacon Hill still good?"

Natasha worried her bottom lip. "I don't know," she answered. "I mean, it's pretty far from MIT, right? Are you going to be okay?"

"Yeah, the T's right there. Why?"

"It's underground."

"So?"

Bluntly, Clint said, "Tony, you had a panic attack because a ceiling was too low."

"The meds are supposed to fully kick in by next week. I'll be fine." He was starting to get sick of repeating himself so much, but it wasn't his fault that no one understood that, yeah, he was all right, getting back to normal, not about to break down any second. "Besides, I just spent the past forty-five minutes in a circular conversation trying to convince my parents that I was safe to go, and their condition is keeping it near adult supervision."

Clint's focus went back his game. "I'm going to need you when I call, Tony," he said. "Think you can get together today?"

"JARVIS, do I have anything I need to do?"

"_Not that you put down, sir._ _Weather updates report an eight percent chance of thunderstorms, so whoever leaves should bring an umbrella._"

Apparently his dad was right about the personality, which was both surprising and not surprising at all. "Can I come?" Natasha asked, rubbed her eyes.

"No, Natasha, you can't," Clint said. "You absolutely are not allowed to join in on the plans you created."

She scowled. "Shut up, I'm still like half-asleep," she said. "Where should we meet?"

"One of our houses," Tony answered. "And can it not be here? I need to get out."

"Do you feel up to leaving?" Clint asked. "I mean, physically. I get that your stir crazy right now, but—"

Before his friends could start getting into a worry cycle, he cut in, "Yeah, _Mom_, I'm positive. I'll just catch a cab."

Following another yawn, Natasha said, "Then you guys are coming here. There's no way I'm leaving my apartment today if I don't have to."

Even if it meant risking Mrs. Romanoff proclaiming that he needed to eat more and he was too skinny in her impossible to understand Russian accent, Tony was glad he was getting out. He hit _End Call_ and told JARVIS to shut down his equipment before heading off to find his mom, forming a counter argument in his head.

.

"What's got you suddenly interested in the energy field?"

Tony shrugged, exhausted from his first day on the full Buspar dose and not really in the mood to talk. Waking up to find himself complete covered in his comforter and causing another flashback that JARVIS had to snap him out of a few hours earlier wasn't helping. If it was either of his parents, he'd tell them he was tired and they'd leave him alone but he'd seen Obadiah once since he got back, and it was for five minutes of the most uncomfortably unnecessary apologies he'd ever gotten. Not to say many people apologized to him because half of the fuck ups in his life were all his fault, but that wasn't the point.

Or maybe it was entirely the point, but he didn't have the mental power to concentrate on that at the moment.

And since he hadn't seen the guy who for a while he saw more than his parents in a really long time, he forced himself to properly answer, "I got bored when I came back and came up with this."

This was far from the truth, but it was bad enough that his dad already knew, and he didn't want to spread the information to anyone else. It was just that after getting electrocuted a couple dozen times, he wasn't a big fan of wires; the ARC reactor eliminated the need for any and considering that he managed to create an entire miniature, functional building area and difficultly concealed escape method in a cave, he was pretty much positive that it should be considered a good coping mechanism.

"What can it do?" he asked, though Tony had a feeling he wasn't really curious and instead trying to make up for leaving him alone for five minutes. Not that he really remembered any of that. There was a pretty wide gap between standing in the JFK international terminal and waking up in a cave with a camera in front of him and bleeding from just about everywhere. "Besides replace a battery."

The Buspar was really starting to get to him and it was a struggle to keep his eyes open. "Never needs to be recharged," he said, and it came out more as a mumble than anything else. "Doesn't overheat or anything either, and it can replace pretty much anything electrical without using up any resources or cause any pollution. Wasn't really intended, but whatever, I guess that's a plus."

Obadiah forehead creased with worry and he just really, really wanted to be by himself at the moment, so he couldn't quite bring himself to care. "Are you feeling all right, Tony?"

"I'm fine," he answered, repeating himself for probably the thousandth time. "I—"

"_Miss Romanoff is calling you, sir,_" JARVIS said suddenly, causing Obadiah to startle. "_Should I let it go to voicemail_?"

"Is that your AI?" He nodded and the other man stood. He added, "I'll talk to you later, you look dead where you sit," and ruffled Tony's hair the way he did as a kid. "Try to get some sleep."

Again, he nodded and wished that the fluoxetine insomnia side effect was combating the Buspar drowsiness one. When Obadiah was out of the room, he said, "JARVIS, get Natasha on the line please."

A moment later, the line clicked open. "_Hey_," Natasha said as he flopped backwards, lying down, and shut his eyes. The sound of a movie played faintly from her end of the call. "_Do you still want a get a ride with us or are your parents taking you up_?"

"Parents are taking me up the day before," he answered, suddenly remembering. "Sorry, we were talking about it earlier, they talked to Steve and Peggy and apparently they know a psychiatrist up there, which means so much for getting out of my meds and—whoa."

"_Tony? Sorry to ask, but are you high?_"

"No," he said and groaned, pressing his palms against his eyes. "I just went from dead tired to wide awake. Fucking typical."

There was a click, and the sound of the movie abruptly stopped. Then she said, "_Typical what?_"

Explaining in entirety was going to take too long, so instead he shortened it with, "Obadiah came over and I was practically asleep. I haven't actually talked to him since…well, in about four months."

"_Isn't that the guy that got you kidnapped?_"

"What?"

"_You know, left you alone or something. Clint and I ended up listening to your dad have an emotion breakdown on Mrs. Rogers. Do you have any idea what I'm talking about?_"

"Sort of," he answered, too antsy now to stay lying down, so he stood up and shuffled into his lab, grabbing a pair of pajama pants that sat atop his dresser so he could change out of his jeans. "Look, we'll figure out meeting times and everything when it gets closer. I'm still on thin ice as is—JARVIS, activate N. -Twelve."

As his lab ceiling changed into the night sky, Natasha said, "Oh yeah, how's that coming along anyway? And are you doing anything right now besides ordering your disemboweled voice around?"

Tony took a seat in front of his main computer again, deciding that the two side effects were fighting against each other too much now for him to be able work complex theories and that he was out of ideas anyway, and clicked on the Tetris icon. This was something he could do mindlessly. "It's going great," he answered, starting on level ten because everything else was too boring. "Also, no one's home if you want to come over and chill. I think that's why Obadiah was here. I'm starting to wonder if the parental separation anxiety's kicked in."

From the other end of the line, he heard the rustling of clothes being moved around in the drawer. "_Goddammit, I can't find shorts_," she said. "_Tony, please tell me your air conditioning is blasting._"

"It's around seventy in here," he answered without looking at the thermostat. "I'm not really a big fan of the heat."

There was a noticeable pause before Natasha said, "_Well, I grew up in Saint Petersburg, so heat and I aren't exactly on the best terms either. See you in a few._"

"Yeah." The line clicked closed without a goodbye. "JARVIS, let Natasha when she comes by."

"_Should I identify myself when she finds no one standing there_?"

"Sounds good."

JARVIS didn't answer and Tony didn't say anything and with the ARC reactor running his lab silently, he realized exactly how much he hated the quiet.

.

Um, I wanted to put an end note here, but I can't think of anything. So, hope you enjoyed!


	4. Step One

Sorry that this is so short. I've been running on full blown insomnia for the past week, and I'm graduating on Friday. Needless to say, it's been a little...hectic.

Anyway, Tony/Clint five, Natasha/Tony/Clint two. Also, got the Lorraine girl from the Captain America. I tried to write a German accent but failed so hard, so I gave up.

Disclaimer: don't own the characters.

.

**Second Step**

Considering that he'd always thought of Peggy and Steve as his aunt and uncle, Tony shouldn't have been surprised by their reactions. Somehow, he was anyway.

"Oh, god," Peggy said and he was caught up in a hug almost before he could step out of the car. About half a second later she pulled back and searched his face, moving some of his hair from his face and he was profoundly thankful that Clint and Natasha weren't here. Affection became a thousand times more uncomfortable when friends were there. Tony wasn't so good with embarrassment. "I'm so sorry were couldn't make it down," she continued as Steve came up behind her. "We've only been back about as long as you have and—"

"I think you're scaring him," Steve interrupted, putting a hand on her shoulder so she let go. Then he said, "Hey, kid. You look better than the last time I saw you."

_Last—_Oh, yeah. When he was so drugged up on Vicodin that he couldn't think, his dad told him Steve was along for a rescue mission too. Which meant last time Steve saw him, he was covered in sand and injuries and blood and passed out cold. "Thanks," he said, letting him put an arm around his shoulders because they had the whole not-family privileges when it came to closeness. Peggy was talking to his parents. "Uncle Steve, can we go inside?"

Outside it was around ninety degrees, and while he probably could put up with it, he didn't want to bother. He'd spent the past six weeks avoiding temperatures seventy-two or above. "How about we go to the apartment?" Steve said and the lack of even a quizzical look gave Tony a pretty good idea that he'd be treated like he was breakable here too. And from the way all the adults looked at him, he knew he wasn't escaping that any time soon.

"Yeah, that sounds like a good idea," his dad agreed and Tony trailed along behind them and into the air conditioned inside. It was obvious the move was recent, with boxes strewn everywhere and furniture awkwardly placed throughout the room without organization.

"Sorry about the mess," Peggy said, pushing a box away with her foot. "I guess we procrastinated a little too much."

His mom smiled and he looked down at his feet, without real reason feeling third wheeled and awkward, more like an observer than someone who was there. Sudden claustrophobia, he realized—it wasn't by much, but at five six, he was the smallest there and currently in the middle of everyone and it wasn't like walking down the street with a moving crowd or sitting on a couch with one or two people because he always sat on the end. For the first time since the low ceiling incident, he felt crowded, and the psychiatrist called this something, disassociation through fear to stop a panic attack.

At the moment he'd rather take the panic attack. The disconnect was familiar in a way he didn't want to accept.

"Yeah, sure," he answered to a question he didn't really hear but got right anyway, and somehow he ended up a chair with a bag of tortilla chips and bowl of "real" salsa in front of him. The air conditioning was on high and his dad and Steve were sitting at the table while his mom and Peggy were in the kitchen, talking in hushed voices.

He blinked and looked around, trying to get his grip on reality because logic was telling him one thing but his subconscious was confused and even though he knew he was looking at a bag of chips, he still felt like he wasn't here at all.

Then, "Tony, do you want sushi?"

It was Peggy, all bright red lips and brown curls falling out of her ponytail the way Natasha's did when she woke up. "Sure," he said.

"Anything in particular? We're ordering from a place down the street."

"I'm okay with whatever."

He still felt a little dazed, but his life slipped back into the present.

.

It took a day, but Tony managed to turn his bedroom into a small version of his lab, complete with a Velcro-on control panel he designed a week earlier to be JARVIS' central command. Clint sat on his bed not long after finishing up his own room, and there was the background noise of water going through pipes as Natasha turned on the shower.

"You know, Tony," his friend said, back against the wall since the bed was pushed into the corner, obviously his lowest priority, "you could've kept your room as an actual room. I can't really see sleeping being possible in here."

He took a seat in the spinny chair, glad he was finished and wondering if he could figure out a way to fit an entire lab in a suitcase to make it portable. "I almost never fall asleep in my bed at home," he answered. "Or a bed in general. I've been okay this long, haven't I?"

"_Mr. Barton makes an excellent point, sir_," JARVIS said. "_You're resting schedule is much too sporadic to be healthy._"

"You don't have to gain up on me," he said, a little annoyed JARVIS wasn't always on his side. Traitor.

With a frown, his friend said, "I actually think we sort of do. Especially since you can't drink coffee anymore."

"I'm allowed to try now." Or at least that was what he thought his old (thankfully, he really didn't like that guy) psychiatrist told him. "It's just a fifty-fifty chance. I'm pretty sure I've said this before."

Clint shrugged. "I guess if it works," he said, which didn't mean much of anything. "Your classes start tomorrow, right?"

"Yeah," he answered, not as excited as he probably should have been. For the entirety of his senior year, he'd been waiting to get out and now that he was, it wasn't as satisfying as he thought. "My first class starts as ten, and I only have two."

"I have class at eight in the morning."

"Sucks to be you." The shower shut off, and the sound of the pipes stopped. That was going to get annoying real fast. "I also have to meet up with babysitter number two."

"I thought you liked Dr. Banner."

Though that was true, he knew that Bruce was even worse at hiding worry than Steve was, and he wanted to avoid that sympathy and constant _are you okay_'s that came with the territory. Mostly, he just wanted to forget but no one was letting him. Maybe if everyone just stopped mentioning it, his subconscious would understand that it wasn't important. "I do," he answered. "I just…I don't know. I think that having to meet up with any new therapist-psychiatrist hybrid doesn't exactly make enthusiasm come easy."

"At least you've had four people verify that this guy's actually good," came Natasha's voice from the doorway and Tony jumped, almost falling out of his chair. "Oh, jeez. Sorry, Tony."

By this point, they'd figured out that he didn't like get surprised, but just because they knew, it didn't make him any less embarrassed. It contributed to everyone's completely unnecessary worry. "It's okay," he said as she walked around and sat next to Clint on the bed. Maybe they should invest in more spinny chairs. "And, yeah, I guess. I think I've met him before too, but was really little or something because I can't remember what he looks like."

He fidgeted, wanting to change the subject but unable to think of a clever enough way to do it. But she seemed to pick up on it because she asked, "What classes are you taking tomorrow?" and their conversation spiraled into college and teachers and avoiding cafeteria food.

.

Meeting up with Bruce was hard and with such a small time slot, the man offered to walk with him to his new psychiatrist's office. As it turned out, this was a good thing, because otherwise he definitely would've gotten lost. Downtown Boston didn't have an infrastructure like New York did, and the awkwardly laid streets made it hard to navigate. To top it off, the GPS on his cell phone got confused because of all the one ways, so it was difficult even without a car.

"You sure you don't need me to go in with you?" he asked when they reached the building. "As an adult to sign you in, I mean. First appointment and all."

He shakes his head. "My dad's known him for a really long time, so he knows I'm showing up by myself," he answered. "Thanks, though."

"Okay," Bruce said. "I'll probably run into you tomorrow, then. If you get lost, give me a call and I'll come pick you up."

"Thanks," he repeats, looking up to the third floor where Dr. Erskine's office was before turning back. "It was nice seeing you again, by the way."

With a small smile, Bruce said, "You too, Tony. Like I said, call me if you need anything."

They exchanged goodbyes and Tony entered the building, taking the stairs up to the third floor to delay the inevitable. It turned out to be a bad idea, as when he reached his destination he felt winded and took a moment to catch his breath, remembering that he used to be able to run the half-mile in a little under two minutes. Fit and a genius, a good combination for high school despite his age, but the fit part didn't exist anymore. After he collected himself, he slipped through the door and headed to the counter, where a blonde woman with a name tag that read _Lorraine_ sat reading _People. _

When she finally noticed him, she put the magazine and asked, "Hi, what can I do for you?"

"I have an appointment for six," he answered. "Anthony Stark."

There was a moment of nothing before Lorraine's eyebrows shot up. "Oh," she said with a smile that screamed _I don't actually care but this was in my job description_. "You can take a seat over there."

"No co-pay?"

She went to answer, but another voice cut in, "The first five appointments are fully paid for by the insurance company."

He turned around and found a vaguely familiar man standing outside the doorway to the office. He definitely couldn't connect his face to a German accent, though, so maybe he'd seen pictures instead. "Thanks," he said, unsure. Something told him this guy was going to be a lot harder to bullshit than Dr. B, his old therapist.

In retrospect, that was probably why his dad and Steve liked him.

"Come this way," Dr. Erskine said, turning around and heading back into the room. Tony followed without complaint. Once he was inside, the psychiatrist motioned towards the chair in front of the desk and shut the door. "Sit."

Again, he listened, and Erskine took a seat across from him. "Well," he said, opening a file on his desk, "you're a very interesting case, Anthony. It is rare that I speak to parents before I meet with an underage client, but your father is a very old friend. Apparently you had another therapist and psychiatrist?"

"Yeah," he answered. "And can you call me Tony, please? No one calls me Anthony."

The man clicked a pen and scribbled something down that at this angle Tony couldn't read. "Of course," he said, and looked away from the paper, back to him. "Now, let's start with the basics: who is Tony Stark?"

Tony stared at him blankly for a moment before realizing this was a legitimate question, even though Erskine clearly had the file right in front of him _and _had talked to his dad and Steve. Shouldn't that have been enough verification of information?

"Well," he said, "I'm a fifteen-year-old MIT student with a birthday in March and full merit scholarship and an apartment near Suffolk and Emerson."

Erskine wrote down something else and Tony caught a glimpse of it, seeing that it was in German and not English which meant his dad probably warned him that he could read upside down. Though he could probably do it with German too, he didn't want to bring attention to himself.

Looking up, the psychiatrist said, "You missed the point of the question. Name, age, height and weight, schooling, major—this I know. I'm asking how you would describe yourself."

Describe himself? Hadn't he just done that? As much as he hated to admit it, he answered, "I don't know what you mean."

"You aren't the first," Dr. Erskine said. "What I mean is what type of person are you?"

For all his intelligence, Tony still couldn't figure out the point behind the question. Dr. B just jumped straight into the problem.

"Well, I'm a genius," he said, trying to think of some bullshit he can say so he can make this as painless as possible. "My social skills aren't _that _bad though, I have friends and I live with them. Never dated anyone. I prefer technology to the outdoors and really hate mosquitoes. I have an AI to control my apartment and spiders freak me out?"

Though Erskine didn't seem satisfied, apparently he was willing to just let it slide. Tony doubted it would last for long. "Tell me about your friends," he said, and it seemed like this was get-to-know-you day. Lull into a false sense of security before the subject of Afghanistan could be sprung on him without warning.

"There's Natasha and Clint," he answered. "They're both from my high school, so a little older than me but not by a lot. Natasha's Russian, she's going to Emerson for journalism and Clint's going to Suffolk for military history. We met in AP Comp-Sci in junior year and the teacher never actually taught the class anything so I helped them, and I don't know, we became friends? 'Tash came up with the idea to stay in the apartment together since we all got accepted into Boston schools and we made it work."

Another scribble. "How is that arrangement working so far?"

"Fine." Fine must be his most well-used word in his vocabulary, but it felt like everyone forgot what it actually meant. "I'm not allowed near the kitchen though. They're too afraid I'll make the fire alarm go off."

"Why is that?"

"I can't cook. Neither can my dad."

A smile tugged at the corner of Erskine's mouth. "I know that personally, unfortunately," he said. "How do your friends feel about the AI?"

They spend the rest of the session talking about his friends and JARVIS and avoid the subject of Afghanistan and his parents and anything else that could be considered sensitive.

.

Again, sorry it's so short!


	5. Perceptional Differences

I wrote this while dead exhausted. I graduated yesterday, then spent the night in the city where I didn't get more than an hour of sleep. But on the bright side, I'm officially no longer a high school student! I am free forever now!

Disclaimer: don't own the characters.

.

**Perceptional Differences**

Despite creating and preferring technology to most other things, Tony had always liked actual books rather something like a Kindle or a Nook. He liked fiction, too, which surprised most people, as long as he avoided anything involving a scientific future. So this was why on Wednesday, three days after class started and his mind was a blank slate of ideas, he found himself rereading some of the _Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, _half-asleep but not tired enough to go to bed.

It was four in the afternoon, and he assumed he was home alone. So it was pretty surprising when Clint opened the door without a knock, a phone pressed to his ear. "He's right here, Mrs. Stark," he said, obvious relief flooding his face when he caught sight of Tony on the bed. "Hold on, he's sleeping, I'll wake him up."

He pressed his phone against his shoulder as he sat down, and said, "Why didn't you pick up your phone, Tony?"

"My—wait, what?" He twisted around and grabbed his phone from the end table, only to find it shut off, which meant not even JARVIS could pick up on it. "Well, fuck."

Clint rolled his eyes and shoved his phone into his hand. Tony pressed it to his ear and said, "Sorry, Mom," making himself sound as sleepy as possible. "Fell asleep."

As his friend went to stand, Tony grabbed his sleeve to keep him in place, remembering that he wanted to talk to him. "_I'm sorry for waking you, Tony_," his mom said apologetically. "_It's just that—well, you know, first call and all. It's good that you're sleeping._"

Except that he wasn't sleeping, and since he moved in a week ago, he'd crashed for maybe four hours in total. "Yeah," he said, and sat up so he was next to Clint. "You know, long day with classes and all."

"_How are they? Are you getting to them okay?_"

He glanced over to his friend, trying to think of a way out of this conversation because he sucked at talking to anyone who wasn't Clint or Natasha over the phone. There was a reason he usually kept to texting. Then again, he never needed to do anything _but _send the occasional text before. "Yeah," he answered. "I don't get winded anymore."

"_That's good. Bruce told your dad that he walked you to Dr. Erskine's the other day. How was it?_"

"The appointment? It was good. First meeting stuff you know." He faked a yawn. "Hey, Mom, I'll call you or Dad later. I want to go back to sleep."

"_Oh! Of course, sweetie_," she said. "_I love you._"

He said, "I love you too, Mom. Bye," and hung up, handing the phone back to Clint. "Thanks. I don't know what happened."

Slipping it back into his pocket, his friend said, "Your parents are still pretty paranoid."

"They don't have to be," he answered, and for the first time said very bluntly, "Everyone's dead."

If Clint was surprised, he did a good job not showing it. He hadn't told that to anyone yet. "I don't think that really matters," he said. "Honestly, Natasha and I are pretty worried too. Might not be logical, but this is our own version of the aftermath."

Tony looked down at the floor, away, and he couldn't remember what he wanted to talk to his friend about in the first place. "I guess," he said dully. "I mean, I get that you guys are freaked out, but I just don't want to think about it anymore."

"You have PTSD," Clint said. "Unfortunately for you, I don't think that's happening any time soon, even with meds. You're going to hate me for saying this, but I think throwing yourself in a new environment probably doesn't help."

Don't cry, he told himself because he could feel the pressure building, but he hadn't even broken down when he woke up in the military base hospital and he refused to let himself have a delayed reaction now. It just hurt like hell hearing it from anyone other than a psychiatrist sitting on the other side of a desk with folded arms and too exhausted to care about the individual anymore. Being told by a friend was completely different and a million times worse.

"I think the flashbacks would go away on their own if people didn't keep bring it up," he said, feeling stupid and awkward and even though the words were definitely coming from him, he felt like he wasn't actually saying anything. Because he shouldn't be admitting this. "Talking about it isn't helping."

"It works for soldiers and other kidnap victims."

"Well, I'm in the unique position of not being a soldier while going through a warzone," he said, "and technically I was taken hostage, not kidnapped. But that's not the point," he added quickly. "Basically, I've dealt with anxiety and other 'issues' alone and it's worked fine for me so far."

Immediately he knew he said something wrong. "You've got to stop saying that," Clint said. "Seriously, do you call not sleeping and living off caffeine _dealing with it_? I mean—fuck—let's face it, Tony, there's shit that me and Natasha can say to you that no one else really can, so I feel pretty justified in saying that you really aren't fine."

Clint was right, of course; there really were things he and Natasha could say that he wouldn't listen to from anyone else. Because they were more consistently present than anyone else in his life, but Tony _liked _his methods of coping, even if no one else understood why he did things the way he did. But he supposed, realistically, that his friend had a point. Usually had a point, really, and Natasha too, because for all his genius and creativity, he really was a fucking idiot. Clint said, "If you don't want to talk to a stranger, you can always talk to us."

"Oh, no," he answered. "See, not telling you is only partially for my benefit. For the most part, it's for yours."

"We can take it."

Tony shook his head. "You'll get nightmares. Or, maybe not. I don't know," he said, and thought that he was so bad at describing things that the odds were slim. He knew technical terms. Somehow, keeping those in mind helped keep him sane.

"If you have another flashback, we can't help you," Clint pointed out, and he wavered a little. He didn't want to admit that he still had those, they were pretty difficult to deny if anyone happened to be around. "Come on, Tony."

"You know the basics," he said, giving in. "They wanted me to build the Jericho out of scrap metal. I refused until I didn't anymore. And I was in a cave in Afghanistan, so it was hot and cramped and now I'm claustrophobic and don't like heat. I don't really like being dirty or submersing myself in water, and I really hate wires and if I ever freak out in my bed it's probably because a blanket's covering my face. And I haven't tested it, but I probably won't like fireworks either. They sound like gunshots."

"They really—"

Tony cut him off with, "Yeah, waterboarding, electrocution, senses deprivation, and mock execution. Enough for you, Clint?"

For a moment neither of them did anything, then his friend said, "Enough? Yeah, I guess. Thanks, you know, for telling me. Like I said, it can help. Does anyone else know?"

"Dad knows about the physical stuff," he answered miserably. "And he can

probably guess at least some of the rest. Maybe Mom, if he told her. But no, you're the first

person I've told. Tell Tash if you want but don't expect me to be able to pull it off again."

The thing about guys was that they didn't normally hug other guys. Clint was pretty typical and Tony wasn't big on affection in the first place, so it was a surprise when his friend's arm suddenly wrapped around his shoulders and pulled him closer. He went to say something but thought better of it and instead just hugged him back. He'd always known he was small for his age, but this made him feel little and skinny and unhealthy. Six weeks and he'd only gained back four pounds. The hug was awkward and weird and felt horribly out of place, but for once he let himself be held and tried his hardest not to cry. Stupid delayed reactions.

"I'm sorry," Clint told him and by this point he understood what it was like to be at a loss

for words. He dealt with it daily. "Natasha and I...well, we figured out some of it. Being afraid of water and how hard you've tried to avoid electrical wires and all. Might not seem like it, but we pick up on things."

"Right," he said. "Where is she anyway?"

Clint shrugged. "I think she has English Comp right now or something."

He untangled himself, feeling uncomfortable but not as much as he should've. "Thanks," he said. "Really. That wasn't exactly easy."

"Yeah," his friend said. "I didn't think it was."

Tony lay backwards, staring up at the ceiling. Without the talking, his room was silent. The ARC reactor didn't make noise the way normal electronics did. Earlier, back home in his lab, the quiet bothered him, but he'd grown to like it now. It didn't make anything sound muffled and he could hear everything clearly. Maybe he'd eventually get back to listening to music too. The ceiling was a light green, drastically different from tan or brown or any other color that rock and sand encompassed.

After another moment of nothing, he said, "I need to start running again or something. My stamina's shit right now."

"Didn't the doctor tell you to take it easy?"

Several had, actually, but he'd never been good at "taking it easy." It wasn't in his nature to be lazy, despite locked himself in the lab for days some times. But even then, he was always doing something, and even with all that sitting around, he was never really out of shape. This new inability to do just about anything was really starting to get to him, and saying out loud what happened to him (or at least some of it and in very objective terms) suddenly made it seem a lot worse. Now it was just another reminder of what happened, and he refused to believe that there was around a ninety percent change that somehow getting past the internal damage wasn't going to happen and he'd stay this weak and psychologically drugged up forever.

Somehow, Clint ended up lying next to him, though he didn't actually register the movement. "You still haven't showed me the sky thing yet," he said. "It's be a while."

It really had been a while, he thought. This was something he designed months ago and the most his friends had seen was a glimpse through a video chat screen. "JARVIS," he said, "activate N. -Twelve."

Immediately, the ceiling was filled in with an image of the night sky, darkening the light in the room, but it felt natural and out-side like. He said, "I wanted to design a way to capture the actual sky, but then I realized if I ever activated it during the day I'd just get a few clouds and the sun."

"How'd you manage this without a telescope?" Clint asked.

Before he could answer himself, JARVIS answered, "_I researched pictures through Google images, Mr. Barton._"

"You can call me by my first name, you know."

"_Technically, I am an electronic butler and Mr. Barton or Miss Romanoff sound exceedingly more formal. Isn't that right, sir_?"

Tony glanced at his friend, not sure if he was supposed to be embarrassed or not. "Um," he said, "I didn't actual design him like that. He just sort of decided he liked it."

With a slight smile, Clint said, "So, you've created life basically. Your AIs develop their own personalities. You aren't going to start building people any time soon, are you?"

Even though he knew the other boy was kidding, he shook his head. "I don't like biology too much," he said. "I know it, but I'm more of a chemistry and physics kind of person. And engineering, but that does a lot of combining of the two."

"Are you working on anything now?" Again, he shook his head. "Okay, guess I don't have to leave them."

He didn't protest because he didn't want to protest and they fell silent, falsely stargazing in the comfort of an air conditioned room.

.

On Tuesdays, he had an hour long break between his Calc. IV class and aerospace engineering lesson that coincided with what Bruce called his "grading period" and he decided that Tony _had _to come up to his office for lunch. Even if he wasn't particularly hungry and had never been a big fan of anything involving olive oil, he picked at the pasta salad to be polite, avoiding as many red peppers as he could.

"So how do you like MIT so far?" Bruce asked and they were about on equal levels of not being able to talk.

"It's good," he answered. "Classes are easier than I was hoping."

Bruce smiles. "Thought you'd say that," he said. "I heard Professor Hammer complaining how you've slept through the past three classes."

Deciding that there was no way he was going to finish the pasta, he stuck the fork in the bowl and put it down on the table. "He's an idiot," he said bluntly. "I was _this _close to telling him he was doing the math the roundabout way the second day, so putting my head down seems easier."

"To keep yourself from correcting him?" He nodded. "Interesting…annoying, either way honestly. I've never had a person fall asleep in my class who didn't fail, but kids text. Especially the freshman."

"I don't want to risk getting my phone taken away," he said. "I could build a new one, but I have my reminders and schedule on it and that'll be a pain in the ass to reprogram."

He checked the clock on the computer and saw he had about half an hour. Bruce said, "It's rude, too." Tony didn't really care about that since he had no respect for his professor after he forgot to carry a one right after multiplying pi and seven eight-six incorrectly, so he didn't think the guy deserved it. "How's the apartment?"

"It's good," he said again since he couldn't think of a better answer. "Better than the dorms. I don't like the idea of a roommate I don't already know."

"My freshman roommate was terrible," Bruce said. "He never left the room for anything other than classes or hygiene reasons, so his side of the room was always covered in crumbs and laundry. And you know me—I hate insects and arachnids and anything like that. My second semester one was good though. We spent the entire time sharing _Swedish Fish_."

Well, _Swedish Fish_ was a pretty good reason to like a person. "Natasha likes to cook and I actually have money for food, so we can eat pretty healthy," he said. "I think she's terrified of the whole freshman fifteen thing."

Bruce didn't say anything right away, but Tony had a feeling he was thinking something along the lines of _you could use it. _When he checked in with Peggy (Steve wasn't there) earlier this week as promised, she straight up said it. Unfortunately for all the adults in his life, his eating habits were as sporadic as they'd always been. Food and sleep, two things he routinely forgot about.

After a moment, the man said, "That's good. People shouldn't stock up on junk food all the time. I know that about half of your classmates eat those chocolate chip pancakes at least twice a week."

"I'm not a big fan of chocolate in the first place," he said. "I'm more of an orange slices or _Sour Patch Kids _type of person."

"Betty's allergic to chocolate so I have to avoid it anyway. Same with peanuts." He paused, taking a bite of the pasta salad. "You don't sleep in _every _class, do you?"

Most would only be a minor exaggeration since, after much arguing with nearly everyone he knew except his guidance counselor, he wasn't allowed to take more than five. "Not all," he answered, and by that he meant two. "And it isn't really sleeping, just not paying attention. So far we aren't going over anything new yet."

It wasn't respectful and he knew it, but respect worked both ways, and though he was smart, he was also young. For some reason, his teachers automatically assumed he was wrong about everything until he proved that they were the ones who made the mistake, not him. By the time he hit his junior year of high school, he gave up trying to reason with any "authority" figures. Blatant disregard was how he ended up meeting Natasha and Clint anyway.

Now there was the added reality that he didn't want to correct teachers anymore because he'd grown a fear of yelling. So far he hadn't gotten yelled at, and was trying avoid it happening until he wasn't able to anymore.

"Has your dad told you the stories of what he did in college?" Bruce asked, and he nodded. "I was in his physics class. Can't remember the professor's name, but he hated him."

Tony thought back, briefly, to their conversation, when his told him about what his grandfather said and even if his parents basically ignored him for the first fifteen years of his life, it could've been worse. Before this point, he never bothered comparing his life to anyone else's because it only bothered him to a minimal amount, but he could see the difference now and it was astounding. And definitely hard to get used to, even after six weeks.

"That'll happen to me eventually," he said. "Dad pretty much assured me of that." He took another glance at the clock. "I better be heading out. Next class is across campus. I'll see you later."

"Try to pay attention this time, okay, Tony?" Bruce told him and stood up to get the door because he was probably the politest person Tony had ever met.

"Right," he said, though he knew it would be another seventy-five minutes of just doodling. He slipped out the door with a quick smile, heading down the half-carpeted hallway.

.

I think I should write more often when I'm tired. This is the longest chapter so far, I think.


	6. Trigger

I was originally going to save this chapter, but I figured logically it would happen sooner or later. It's a lot...darker than any of the other chapters will be except _maybe _the resolution if I find a way to make it so be warned in advance. I really hope it doesn't kill the story. :/ And you're going to think I'm nuts, but the final scene was inspired by a 90s sitcom.

Disclaimer: don't own the characters.

.

**Trigger**

Tony was having one of those horrible, delusional moments again after a particularly bad incident where his mind stopped working and he started hearing a voice from home. Panic response, Yinsen called it, but he was pretty sure going insane was a better way of putting it.

"I'm fine," he was saying, trying to pretend that he didn't notice how badly he was shaking because he's got to stop acting so damn fragile. "Really, it's okay, I'm—"

"_You're not—oh, shit._"

The voice sounded like it was coming through static and he shut up because it was hard enough to breathe already, his anxiety growing and all that and he'd thought after _this fucking long _that he should be used to it by now. But he was shot twice that he remembers, and the sound of gunfire and the occupying heat that went along with it when the bullet passed about six inches from his eyes caused his already destroyed nerves to break down further. There was an arm around his waist, but except for false-Clint babbling on with, "_Just calm down, you're seeing things, why's this lasting this long, you're going to be okay, Tony, I swear to God_—" there wasn't much sound.

He wasn't sure how much time had passed, whether it was a moment or an hour, when he heard, "_Jarvis, active the thingy_," followed by an unfamiliar, "_Beginning activation_, _Mr. Barton_," and he knew he must really be gone if he was fabricating an entirely new voice. He couldn't remember the last time he'd had something to eat or drink so maybe someone drugged him again.

"_C'mon, Tony, breathe, it's not real, snap out of it, you can do it, no one's going to hurt you, you're_—" A sigh of relief and he was starting to feel a little dizzy now. "_NATASHA! We have a problem!_"

There were hurrying footstep and—Footsteps? Footsteps on wood and—and—an apartment, he was thinking of. Then there was a hand placed against his face and a half-reality came rushing in so fast that it was almost a physical force and despite himself, he screamed.

Natasha's hand retreated instantly and _there's an apartment in Boston, an MIT student, his friends living with him, his parents at home, an AI with the picture of the sky for reasons like this, can't sleep worse than ever _but that couldn't possibly be real because his vision was still filled with the cave and fire and he was fever level hot. PTSD, he struggled to remember, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and he hadn't had an attack since that day back at home, so this wasn't, well, impossible.

"_What the fuck happened, Clint_?"

"_A car alarm went off and—_" He forced himself to get his lungs working, to get air in and out and breathe. "—_it sounded like a gunshot. We were talking _and Tony just freaked."

Reality began to set fully, but it was like he was seeing double, vision fluctuating back and forth between the cave and real life, and it made him feel nauseous. "I'm here," he got out before deciding that talking and focusing was too much effort and squeezing his eyes shut, turning away, instinctive-like, and his face collided with his friend's shoulder. A second arm joined the first, and he chose to just say fuck it for once and let himself be held. At the moment, his sense of touch was what was keeping him grounded.

"Should I—" Natasha started and couldn't finish because Clint answered, "Yeah, this is a bad one."

Footsteps retreated and he concentrated on calming down his racing heartbeat because it was only making breathing harder, clinging onto the older boy's shirt because he needed to feel a certain amount of _there_ness to stay in the now. Then he heard water through the pipes as the sink turned on and a moment later the footsteps came back. Clint untangled him and maneuvered his body so he was facing forward, at eye level with his friend. And Natasha, who he'd always thought was incredibly hot, looked absolutely beautiful because those bright green eyes of hers proved that yeah, he was here, and here was real.

Unfortunately, there was a cup of water in one hand and his fast-acting anxiety meds in the other, and it put him immediately on the defensive. "No way," he said, shaking his head, and any pills other than Advil unnerved him in ways what he couldn't explain. "I'm okay now, I'm back, see? I don't need them."

He knew that he said something wrong almost before he finished because their looks of relief were killed instantly. Maybe it was just because he was recovering from the worst flashback he'd had so far, or maybe it was because he was so damn scared of any and all anger directed to him, but he froze up and retreated inside of himself real quick.

"_Would you like me to contact Mr. Stark's parents, Miss Romanoff_?" JARVIS asked, which caused the panic start to build again.

Before either could answer, he said, "NO!" perhaps a little louder than he meant to. Forcing himself to quiet a little, he continued, "Please don't, they'll—Mom and Dad worry about me already and I can—I'll take the medication!"

"Obviously they have reason," Natasha said, voice overlapping Clint's, "Then fucking _say it_, Tony."

How pissed off he sounded freaked out Tony more than he'd like to admit and he shot off the bed so fast that he felt stupid. Natasha grabbed him with an indignant yell of, "Clint!" water sloshing to the floor, and the fact that he was hyperventilating forced even him to concede that, yeah, the flashback had turned into an anxiety attack that probably wouldn't go away any time soon.

"Jesus," said Clint, and the lack of a squeeze on his shoulder or anything simple and not touchy-feely or even touchy at all spoke volumes of how serious this really was, "I'm so sorry. I just—neither of us is going to do anything, I promise."

He didn't answer and somehow Natasha got him to sit down again, pushing the pills and water into his hand. He swallowed them down without complaint because this wasn't battle he was capable of fighting, stubborn as hell or not.

"_His parents, Miss Romanoff_?"

"Admit it," she said, firm but not angry which he appreciates. "Admit it and I'll say no."

It took him half a second, which was slow by his standards, to realize what she meant and because he saw himself as a high velocity object about to crash and burn against an impenetrable, unmovable wall, he answered, "I'm not okay. I've got PTSD and can't even deal with a car alarm, so all logic says I failed pretty bad and am totally fucked."

This seemed to placate both of them (for now, he had a feeling), and Natasha said, "Not his parents, JARVIS. But we have to get an adult on the phone."

"_I suggest…His recent contacts include a Bruce Banner, Dr. Erskine, Peggy Rogers, and Steve Rodgers. Further, he has the names_—"

"Steve Rogers," Clint said. "Can you get him on Tony's phone, not on speaker?"

"_Of course._"

Weren't the things he designed supposed to be on his side? Apparently not, but he was so drained at the moment that he couldn't find it in him to be irritated. As his phone started ringing, Natasha sat down next to him and Clint grabbed it off his bed and disappeared from the room, door closed behind him.

"You'll start to calm down in about five to ten minutes," she said. "It'll make you really tired."

"I know," he answered, and already felt exhausted. The mental strain it caused turned out to be difficult to manage. "You're going to call my parents eventually, aren't you?"

"We'll see what Steve says," she said, that unreadable expression of her back up. "Do you want to lie down?"

Though he really did want to, he shook his head. "MIT is easy, but I really like it," he said, feeling vulnerable and useless and just so utterly afraid. "My parents might pull me out if they find out it was worse than an anxiety attack and I don't want that."

"You're fifteen, you can deal with waiting until the spring semester or next year." She had a point, but he'd always been great at ignoring what was good for him, usually doing the complete opposite, and a mental disorder and a ton of impossible-to-recover-from injuries evidently didn't have the ability to change that. "I know you don't want to hear it, but this might not've been such a great idea. What if you'd been in school, Tony? What then?"

He shrugged, not wanting to think about it, and Clint reentered, taking a seat on the other side of him. He looked pale and worried and not at all like his usual mischievous self. Maybe this really _was _a bad idea, he thought. Living with an insane person (because right now he honestly did feel nuts) probably wasn't easy to deal with on top of homework and classes.

"He didn't have work," he told them, "so he it'll only be a few minutes. Tony, I got to say, you probably aren't going to like this."

After he didn't answer in a reasonable time slot, Natasha said, "He knows. We just talked about it."

Somehow they realized that since the meds hadn't kicked in yet, he was still inwardly whacked out and she started telling him about her day and then Clint joined in and he stayed quiet, listening. It helped, and he quickly found himself getting tired. Before he could crash though, there was a knock on the front door, and Natasha got up to answer it. A few seconds later she was back, following a very worried looking Steve. She gave a flick of her head that he was probably supposed to miss, his other friend stood up, and they exited. Steve took his place on the bed.

"Clint told me you had an episode," he said and Tony nodded, "because a car alarm sounded like a gunshot."

Oh, yeah, that was what triggered it. Apparently fireworks weren't the only thing that could remind an unstable, ex-hostage kid of a mock execution or bullet to…well, everywhere, at the end. Steve continued, "I'm not sure if he told you, but you were stuck in that state of for almost four minutes."

In flashback terms (or at least for him), four minutes was a long time, or at least for one that strong. Not that it was saying much, since he'd only had three by this point. "I scared them pretty bad, didn't I?" he asked.

"Yeah," Steve answered. "Yeah, you did. You took the anti-anxiety, right?" Again, he nodded. "You'll probably fall asleep soon. I'll be right outside when you do, bedroom door open just in case."

And since this was Steve Rogers, and man he'd know quite literally since he was born, it was shockingly easy to admit, "This counts as crazy, doesn't it? I feel like I am, anyway."

"Aw, don't be like that," the man said, Brooklyn accent getting stronger, which meant he was more worried than he was trying to show. "You aren't crazy. Traumatized, yes, but you're still Tony Stark. Everyone'd be more worried if you _didn't _have flashbacks."

Then without cause, he suddenly really, really wanted to see his dad and why, he didn't know. Or no, he did, it was because—he'd never been there before, but he found him and saw him at his absolute worse, and was officially the only person who knew exactly what was did, and exactly what was done to him, though Steve might too, because it was pretty damn obvious; but his dad saw all the medical records and woke him up from his first flashback and that had to mean something. So when Steve said, "I have to call your father, you know, that right?" he couldn't find it in him to argue anymore.

Unfortunately, before he could tell him this, the drowsiness side effect hit his brain, become too strong to handle, and he passed out.

.

True to his word, Steve stayed the entire time, and apparently called his parents, because from not far outside his door he could hear the murmur of four voices. His dad then, but Boston was five hours from New York, so how long he was out was a mystery. He sat up, ignoring the lightheaded feeling that came as a side effect of the anti-anxiety medication and clicked the button on his cell phone. _11:01_, it read, which meant a total ten hours. Considering that he was normally lucky if he got three hours of sleep (or lately, any at all), he felt more exhausted than he did rested.

After putting his phone in his pocket, he stood up and got himself out of the room, narrowly avoiding tripping over a spinny chair and before this mess he was anything but a klutz. He slipped through the halfway opened door and found his dad, Steve, Natasha, and Clint gathered around the small round table in the kitchen/living room area the last renters left for some reason. And the apartment's floors were made of wood rather than tile or carpet and creak when he walked, alerting the attention of everyone in the room.

"How're you feeling?" his dad asked as he sat down in a fifth chair they obviously pulled from Clint's room.

He answered, "Better," rather than "Fine" because Natasha was giving him a look that read _If you so much as say that word, I will make you miserable. _And since he felt so utterly pissed off at himself for worrying everyone, dragging Steve into this and accidently pulling his dad from what was probably an important meeting or midway through inventing something, he found himself adding, "Sorry."

For a moment, no one said anything, just started at him incredulously. Then Clint said, "Well, fuck," and slouched back into his chair like Tony was supposed to understand what that meant.

Something was wrong with that he said, apparently, because Natasha looked exasperated, Steve worried, Clint weary, and his dad was pinching the bridge of the nose. So to make it worse, he was the cause of a headache too.

"I think you should come home," his dad said with a sigh. "At least for the weekend. I spoke to Abraham, and he told me that having you back in New York for a few days might help you feel better."

He bit the inside of his cheek to keep himself from asking whether or not he'd be allowed to come back, because he had a feeling this was going to be conditional again. "Okay," he answered, not having it in him to protest yet. "I don't have class on Monday, or tomorrow."

"Do you think you'll be able to go back to sleep, Tony?" He shook his head, honest, because those ten hours was probably all he was going to need for the week, if not more. "Should we leave now or tomorrow? It's up to you."

Since he was embarrassed by what happened, and really didn't like the way everyone was looking at him, he said, "Can we just go now?"

"Sure," his dad answered with a half-smile he'd never seen until two months earlier. "Let's go, I'm parked down the street."

.

Being home, surprisingly, really did make him feel better and he knew with a shocking amount of clarity that, yeah, maybe going off to college right away wasn't such a good idea. The morning after, he joined his dad in the lab because he understood now that simply dropping work wasn't easy, and he knew from experience that the easiest way for a Stark to relieve stress was to sketch out designs on graph paper until something looked right. And he hated himself pretty bad now for causing the twenty-one pieces of crumbled up ideas scattered on and around the table.

His dad looked up when he came in and pushed a few papers off the table so he could sit down. Neither of them used chairs much, a similarity he hadn't noticed until recently.

He took a seat and his dad put down the pencil, hopping up next to him and honest to God, Tony wished that they were always like this. Maybe then none of this would've happened. But he killed that train of thought because what ifs were never his strong point and all they ever did was make his anxiety worse.

"I'm not allowed back, am I?" he asked, because even if it was just Saturday, this needed to be addressed.

After a moment of noticeable hesitation, his dad answered, "I don't know, Tony. Your mom's really against it, and honestly both of us are scared of what will happen if you're in school when this happens, but I have to admit that you have more support there. I mean, yesterday proved that Clint and Natasha could snap you out of it, and they were able to get Steve and Abraham on the phone immediately."

"And if I'm here, you two have to go back to work eventually."

His sighed. "Unfortunately," he said. "At the same time, though, I feel like Boston isn't helping you recover. It's unfamil—what did I say?"

There was a very clear edge of panic in his voice and maybe Tony was just being selfish because it was getting pretty obvious that he was shooting _everyone's _nerves to hell. None of them deserved it, just like no one deserved to die for someone like him either because after screwing up so bad he was the one who should have to deal with retribution. Worrying over him was pointless because he was the catalyst to getting himself into the hostage situation. Somehow.

And it was just that….Nights were hard, and the medication must have some paradoxical effect because all his mind could think up as he lay in bed, awake, was what they said to him, and that it was probably exaggerated but there had to be some truth behind it anyway. Flashbacks and panic attacks and the explosion of always-present survivor's guilt didn't help either.

"I—I," he said, tripping over his own words again before he managed to compose himself a little, remind his natural instincts that _crying was not okay. _Then he fixed the feeling with, "You aren't going to commit me or anything, right? Because—Well, because I know I'm not really right by now, but I'm that bad you have to—"

His dad's eyes were wide with shock. "Committed?" he repeated. "God, Tony, you're struggling, but it's not severe enough. You're probably the only person in the world that I can't see that helping."

It took him a moment because of his own surprise, but Tony figured out what he meant, that his ability to create things like the ARC reactor and cope by keeping his mind working at his normal pace, a blessing and a curse, was keeping him sane in a way that walls of "comforting" colors and the hovering of staff and fuck knew that else never could. His dad got off the table and stood in front of him, analyzing in the same way he did. And he might hate physical contact, and after how much he'd been dealing with it over the past nine weeks logically should've made him avoid it more than ever, he found himself reaching out towards his dad and when he hugged him back, Tony felt a frightening amount of relief.

To make it worse, his eyes hurt like they hadn't since he woke up screaming to having his arm cut open without anesthetic so Yinsen could remove a mildly electrified wire that somehow got stuck under his skin. So he broke down completely against his dad's shoulder, feeling pathetic and useless, because the area hurt again as he was flooded with not-quite-flashback memories of getting stitched up with a badly cleaned needle and string torn from a shirt before he was bandaged with a cloth covered with a three week old oil strain and blood from God knew when. Break the kid first had been the obvious logic, because a fifteen-year-old boy was easier, and sometimes it stilled amazed him was through all of that, he only spilled something once and it was badly fabricated bullshit that was figured out within two days. After a while, he had a feeling that it was out of spite.

"Y-you love me, r-right?" he said, surprised because he didn't think like this, let alone talk like it, and feeling vaguely ashamed but knowing that he _needed _reassurance that he wasn't a total screw up. The crying made him stutter. "T-this isn't ju-just 'cause you feel b-bad, right?"

"No, Tony," his dad answered, rubbing circles on his back, forcibly reminding him that yeah, he really was just some kid. "I love you, and your mom does too. You're safe now, we're not going to let anything happen to you again. And we're going to figure out what's best for you—all of us. You're the best son anyone could ever ask for."

Entered the stray, ration thoughts of, _No I'm not_, and _Then why didn't you say it until now_? But he didn't voice either of these and instead squeezed his eyes shut, trying to stop this stupid, useless, pointless mental break. "O-okay," he said. "I l-love you too, Dad. You know tha-that, right?"

"Yeah," his dad said, "yeah, I do," and added, "Are you tired? Or hungry?"

He shook his head. "C-can we just w-work on something? I don't w-want to th-think about it."

"Okay." He had a feeling his dad was thinking, _That's dangerous_, and was profoundly glad that he didn't comment on it. "We'll figure something out."

In end, they worked on possible ways to make cars fly, silly as it was, and Tony discovered that the two of them had a similar sense of humor, because within the hour, his dad figured out how to make him laugh.

.

I wrote this way too fast for the word count to be possible.


	7. Going 'Round in Circles

So, this chapter's kind of a short and repetitive, but it's basically Tony trying to figure out in his own way what's happening. Basically, sorry about that. Also, I'm sorry for the spelling mistakes and other such typos in _all _of the chapters, but I have trouble picking up on things. I always have too - like, to the point that my teacher thought I was dyslexic in kindergarten until she found out I'd already read _The Hobbit _on my own. And I have an idea for a pairing-less OC story, but I'm not sure it's a good idea to have two stories that aren't canon. I would add a frowny face emoticon here, but I can never remember what works and what doesn't on this site.

Disclaimer: don't own the characters.

.

**Going 'Round in Circles**

At first, Tony wasn't sure if he wanted to go back to school, and he wasn't sure if he wanted to stay either. It had nothing to do with academics, or stress; he felt like he was more trouble than he was worth to everyone and it was pretty obvious that out of all the people he'd come in contact with in past nine weeks, only three had the faintest idea of what to do with him. His dad, Steve, and Peggy had all been part of the war at one point or another and PTSD just came with territory. But knowing how to deal with it didn't make it any less frustrated, he imagined, and it wasn't in his nature to be okay with becoming anyone else's problem. And if he went back to school, Natasha and Clint would have to deal with him daily; but even he conceded that Boston was probably safer for him. If he stayed here, he became his parents' problem and considering that he, well, _liked _that they liked him, he didn't want to fuck that up.

Basically, he was stuck.

In the end, it was Natasha and Clint who convinced him, like they always seemed to be able to do because somehow the three of them just sort of _got _each other. So it was no surprise that the two of them opened up a video chat with him Saturday evening to let him know he was an idiot.

"Hey," he said once JARVIS connected the call, trying to make it sound as if he _wasn't _contemplating not coming back. "Sorry about Friday."

Natasha rolled her eyes. "Jeez, you don't have to apologize."

Yes, I do, he thought and apparently Clint could read minds because he said, "Relax, it's fine. We got you out of it, didn't we? How're you feeling, anyway?"

And because he didn't want Natasha to figure out a way to kill people through computer screens, he answered, "Better now that the meds wore off. Mom says the old psychiatrist prescribed the dose assuming I'd gain weight back, so it lasted it long that it should've."

His two friends glanced at each other before Natasha asked, "They're letting you come back, right? Like, did Erskine clear you?"

"Um," he said, trying to decide whether or not he should lie about this. "Well, they—"

"So that's a yes?" Clint said and he nodded because dammit, his friends just looked so pleased that he couldn't say no. "Awesome! What did your parents say? They're good with it too?"

"Neither of them really want me to," he said, "but they think it's a better idea because I have more people around if I need help with anything or whatever in Boston. They double checked with Rogers and Bruce and basically I have to go to therapy twice a week rather than once, and Erskine's adjusting the dosage to make sense."

He hoped that this would be the end of it, that they'd just accept the answer and he could tell his parents that he wanted to because the final decision was supposed to be his. But his luck had never been good, and Natasha was just about the only person in the world who could "read" him or whatever people called it. The saying never made much sense to him. "What about you?" she said, and she was going to make an amazing journalist once she graduated. "Are you okay with this, or is this something the adults agreed on?"

Ever since he got back, he'd grown a problem with lying that he'd never had before, and his mouth felt dry. "I've got end say," he answered. "But yeah, I want to go back."

Though Clint seemed to be perfectly fine with his response, Natasha still looked skeptical. Thankfully, she didn't say anything because Tony wasn't sure how to reply. "Good," she said, but the pause let him know that she didn't believe him in the slightest. "We want you back too, in case you're wondering. Just don't think we're willingly to leave you alone for a while."

"So I need to constantly be babysat now?"

Clint said, "Tony, don't even try to complain. You're deal with, that clear?"

"Crystal, Mr. Barton."

Again, Natasha rolled her eyes. "Oh, shut up, Tony. And we have to gone. I'm dragging him food shopping. You want anything in particular?" He shook his head. "Okay, then. See'ya."

"Bye."

They ended the chat and he flopped back with a sigh, sinking low in his chair. For the first time in he didn't even know how long, he felt unsure about his own decision. On one hand, he really did want to finish out college and figure out how to end this because it didn't seem to be getting any better. But, on the other, he knew he was inconveniencing a ton of people who didn't need it. Everyone else had enough going on with his psychological train wreck getting itself in there and he wished they'd just see this now so that he wouldn't have to deal with the fallout later on.

Tony wasn't good with disappointment.

So he decided that for now he'd go under the assumption that they weren't all going to hate him in the end, but keep it in mind so that he wouldn't be surprised when they finally did. It was inevitable that it was going to happen sooner or later. And, when he really thought about it, his parents suddenly making an active attempt to repair their relationship wasn't going to make it any easier. Maybe if he wasn't surprised it wouldn't hurt so bad and he could go back to the way it used to be because before Clint and Natasha wedged their way in, he didn't really have people in his life. He survived that fine, then, and he could do it again. Probably.

.

As he laid in bed his fist night back in Boston, unable to sleep because his thoughts wouldn't slow down, he thought to himself that confusion didn't come naturally to him. Being fifteen and a freshman, this should be a feeling he dealt with all the time, and it was unfortunately become more common. Up until he graduated high school, though, he always knew exactly what he was doing and all the accompanying answers. So as he stared blankly up at the Google-selected night sky, he wondered how he was going to go about solving it, and decided to break it down the way he would any other problem.

First, he had to identify the cause. That was easy—he wasn't sure where he wanted to be, or what he wanted to do. In New York, the familiarity was definitely something of a relief, but here in Boston was considered less "dangerous" according Dr. Erskine, who was used to dealing with PTSD in soldiers by this point. The problem with Boston, though, was he had to rely on others to keep him from having a mental break down. Then again, in New York his parents would have to deal with him, and while his dad was more equipped to help him out than, say, Clint or Natasha were, the fact remained that he had to pretend not to notice how wary everyone was. So part of him wanted to go back home, but another part wanted to stay in Boston, and the largest part of him had no clue whether if he should chose one of those or figure out something else.

Second, identify possible solutions, and this was where the confusion really started because he didn't know _what _the solution was. Figuring out something else (preferably on his own) was his personal choice, but even he had to admit that he wasn't currently in the mental state to manage that. That, and at fifteen getting his medication on his own wasn't exactly possible. In terms of readily possible, sticking with Boston was the best option for "support" reasons, and supposedly no one minded yet. Supposedly. In New York, his parents had to work and he wouldn't have school to distract himself and lack of distraction couldn't do anything for him but make it worse.

Finally, identify all the best possible solution and elaborate upon until he reached a singular, correct answer. But that was the problem: he couldn't figure how to elaborate on _any _of them. Just because Boston seemed like the best choice didn't mean he was right. Support to stop anything dangerous only lasted long enough for everyone to get sick of him, and then he'd have to figure out something else. All possible solutions branched off into possible results, and no matter how he hard he tried, he couldn't find a single resolution that was anything other than a disaster. He had three years before he could legally take care of himself (the thought of emancipation at sixteen briefly crossed his mind but that was basically suicide, or at least figuratively), something that even JARVIS knew, which was why his automatic reaction was to contact someone else, usually an adult (because Natasha didn't count yet).

All of this meant that, for the first time in his life, Tony was unable to find an answer.

There was a knock on his doorframe (he _still _wasn't allowed to have any real privacy and it was two and a half months later) and he looked over to see Clint standing there. "Figured you'd be up," the other boy said, leaning against the wall. "Are you even trying?"

He sat up and shrugged. "Not really," he answered. "What about you?"

"Can't sleep for some reason," he said. "Thought I should check on you."

The lack of full sentences meant he was tired, and Tony wasn't sure if it was self-centered or not to wonder if it was his fault. He'd freaked them out, but of everyone he got involved, it was probably the worst for Clint. Though he still wasn't sure exactly what he happened, he knew he must've frozen up and probably talked out loud too. "You can come in if you want," he said. "Or we could play video games in your room if you're willing to risk waking Natasha."

Five minutes later, they were doing just that, with the volume turned down all the way and the lights off and how they managed to find a three bedroom apartment that wasn't a penthouse or whatever was still somewhat of a mystery. Clint told him, "My freshman lit teacher's a bitch. Like, on par with Ms. Isben, which I didn't even know was possible."

"Why?" Tony asked, distracted as he whacked into a horde of zombies. Unlike his friend, he couldn't get high scores of shooting or melee games without looking at the screen. "What she'd do? You can be as a bad as a sixty-eight-year-old Latin teacher?"

"She gets too obsessed with the technical stuff in essays rather than content," he answered. "And you know me, I'm worse at proofreading than Natasha, and her friends language isn't even English. Also, yeah, apparently it is possible to be as bad as a sixty-eight-year-old Latin teacher."

"So, what, did you fail?"

"Just got a C." Tony's mind quickly supplied that a C was the lowest grade Clint had ever gotten in any subject other than Art I sophomore year. "I mean, it's college. Aren't they supposed to grade for like what you're saying and all that? And it's not even like my mistakes are all that bad. I just fail at comma rules."

As they reached the safe house, he said, "I don't know, but I'm pretty sure everyone who isn't an English major fails at comma rules. Is she that bad in class, too?"

"She's sexist against guys," he answered. "It sucks. Doesn't matter what we say, we're always wrong about _something_. I point out that Hamlet's dad supposed to represent the devil, and she told me that it was supposed to be Satan, when I'm pretty sure the critical article I read in AP used both terms. She does it with the other guys too. We've just stopped talking by this point."

So far, three out of five of his teachers hated him, but that was because he slept through their classes, which gave them at least a little reason. He was used to people overreacting to his inattentiveness, even though he clearly continued getting the highest grade in all of his classes. "Told you that should've taken that AP test," Tony said, and they exited into Sugar Mill. "This level's going to suck without sound, you know that, right?"

Clint shrugged. "Whatever," he said. "But yeah, I guess I should've. Still, eighty-seven's pretty expensive and I was already taking three. And the SATs. My dad was unemployed at the point too, remember? Fucking economy."

"True, yeah." The overall conversation was random and unprompted, but he got it. Clint was like him, and sometimes avoidance was easiest to get something across. "I'm sure Tash could help you proofread, but I don't know what to tell you for the whole sexism thing. Wasn't your trig teacher like that or something?"

"Reverse," he answered, "so Natasha had to deal with this. Which I always thought was weird since Mrs. Fritz was, well, a fresh-out-college female who looked like an ultra-feminist."

"And then you had our CompSci teacher, who taught you nothing."

"Yup."

They fell silence, focusing on the game and Tony wondered if his friend was out of words the way he was. And had been for a while now, too. Still, sitting up at two in morning and playing zombie survival games while trash talking teachers both old and new made him feel _almost _like a normal MIT student. That was something, anyway.

It felt nice.

.

Yeah...again, sorry. And sorry for apologizing so much, I tend to get like this when I'm sick.


	8. Math Help and Friends

This is fluff. Just total, shameless fluff. After the past three chapters, I _needed_ something happy. The entire thing is literally just the three friends chilling in the apartment, and I haven't decided yet whether or not it'll have any bearing on the plot.

**Also**, this is the last chapter before the pairing polls close, so please suggest! Though honestly I might scrap it altogether and focus on the fluff that is the three of them instead. And yes, I did just use fluff four times in the same author's note. xD

Disclaimer: don't own the characters.

.

**Math Help and Friends**

Natasha looking like she was about to cry was _not _something either Tony nor Clint were used to, so when she came home on a Tuesday afternoon seemingly on the verge of tears, the two boys just stared at each other in bewilderment.

"Tony, I need your help," she said before either of them could do anything. "Like, right now would be nice."

He sat down at the table next to her as she pulled a textbook out of her messenger back and asked, "What's—oh."

"It's a fucking liberal arts college," she said as she flipped open to whatever the necessary page was. "Why do I have to taking calculus _at a liberal arts college_? I mean, sure, I was fine until now but after this I'm just filled with whats. Why can't I take that IQL thing that they have at your school, Clint?"

"Told you that should've gone with Suffolk," he said.

Almost miserably, she answered, "Emerson has a one hundred percent hiring rate straight out of college _and _I got a scholarship. I wasn't expecting this, though."

After everything he'd been stuck dealing with since that flashback three weeks ago, it'd completely slipped his mind that his friend, a journalism major, was stuck taking an advanced course in a subject she was okay in. "What're you on?" he answered, looking over at the book. "Oh, derivates."

"Read the explanation, Tony," she said, shoving it in front of him and considering that he was one of the few things in the world that could frustrate her, this had to be bad. "It's just confusing me more. I don't get it, I don't even know why I have to take this and God, I hate my admissions counselor so much right now."

Clint took a seat across from them. "You could've dropped the class when you got it," he pointed it.

"It wasn't _hard_ in the beginning," she said, running her fingers through her hair, which was another sign of a how much this stressed her out and he'd pretty much forgotten that she sucked at this. English (ironically) and wheedling out information were her strong points. "At first the pre-calc I took in high school was harder than this, but screw everything, the only reason I passed that was because you could explain it better than the teacher who didn't understand the point of shorter ways to solve the questions. And right now it's like I have Laurel all over again."

"Just calm down, Tash." This felt so reversed because of what'd been happening lately. "You'll get it. And remember that after this, you'll never have to take another math course again. Unless you want a PhD, in which case you'll have to take the GRE, but that's beside the point."

She flipped open her notebook, which was a mess of cross outs and eraser marks. "Easy enough for you to say," she answered. "You're good at everything."

"That's not true. I'm horrible at creative writing and understanding Shakespeare, which you're great at."

"And cooking. You suck at that too."

"Oh, shut up, Clint."

Natasha managed a smile, but it didn't seem entirely genuine. "So you've got a point," she said. "But really. I have the next class two days from now and I still have a research paper to finish for tomorrow, so it would be pretty great if I could get this out of the way. Clint, go away, you're distracting."

He stood, taking his own textbook off the table. "I have to go to class anyway. But thanks, I feel so loved."

After a quick exchange of goodbyes, he left, and Tony focused back on the derivates problem. It was pretty surprising that he ended up friends who were an English person and a history person.

"Okay," he said, taking his notebook from her and going to a clean page. "I'll do the exact same thing I did last year."

She nodded, seemingly calmed down a little. "I understand everything up to the quotient rule, I think. I don't know, quick explanation maybe?"

Being needed again felt comparatively more awesome to the way things had been going recently, everyone treating him like he was made of glass or something when he wasn't going to break down if left alone for more than a couple of hours and all that. Unfortunately, the only time he ever wanted someone with him was on the T, but unless Bruce left at the same time, that was normally the only time of day when he was completely by himself.

The explanation took longer than it used to back in pre-calc, but considering that Natasha was wound up from stress, it wasn't all that surprising.

.

"Why don't you guys ever go out with people?"

It was Saturday night and the three of them were sitting around the table eating frozen pizza while the obvious sounds of a party floated up from the floor below where four other college students lived. His two roommates looked at him blankly for moment before realization hit and Natasha said, "_Oh_," like he was being an idiot.

Clint answered, "You do know the two of us have social skills as bad as yours, right? Like, the only reason we're friends is because our parents pretty much forced us to get along when she moved to America. Perks of being neighbors."

"And the only reason we became friends with you is because you didn't think we were freaks or anything," Natasha added. "Basically, we don't like people same as you."

That was something he never understood: the opinions of their old classmates. For the most part, they had a surprisingly non-clique-ish school despite it being in the City, but (apparently, he never really paid attention until they somehow became a group) a neighbor/classmate of theirs caught Clint sitting on the edge of his apartment building's roof and automatically assumed he was suicidal even after he insisted that he just liked high places. Natasha was simply antisocial and introverted but lost the ability to not be noticed after a senior harassed a girl in their in the gym class she and he shared when they were freshman and she freaked out on him to the point that the guy couldn't even look at her. Tony had a similar reputation on the grounds that he was the youngest by three years and still conveniently small for his age, had the highest GPA in the school, along with legitimate social problems.

Yeah, maybe that was a pretty stupid question. But that didn't he was able to be okay with it.

He said, "Isn't the point behind college to meet new people?"

The two exchanged those frustratingly unreadable looks that he'd learned to hate over the past could of years. "For me the entire point is to get a degree in annoying people," Natasha answered. "Are we really having this discussion?"

He picked at his pizza, eyes focused down, feeling embarrassed but still thinking they were lying. Earlier they made it pretty clear that they weren't leaving him alone and while what they said here made sense, he still felt like it was his fault that they weren't going out and being normal college freshman. He'd acknowledged the moment he got his grudging acceptance letter that this was impossible for him since he looked his age so he couldn't do anything in the first place and was getting his Bachelor's by seventeen, Masters' by eighteen unless the whole being held hostage thing fucked that all up.

Suddenly, Clint said, "It's supposed to storm tonight," like he was hit by a realization.

Tony looked up. "What?"

"Yeah, really," his friend said. "Full on thunderstorm. First of the season. It hasn't rained since we were here, has it?"

"Drizzled that one night in September," Natasha answered. "Think that was it though. I hate thunder, I can never sleep."

Thunder—? Oh god, just like that he was embarrassed again. But he was forewarned right now, so nothing was going to happen. " Let's get a bad indie film on Netflix or something. With the party downstairs, I don't think any of us will."

An hour later the three of them are collapsed on Clint's bed, sharing a carton of orange strawberry sherbet they got from Faneuil Hall, watching a movie about a killer tire named Robert, and Tony had to admit that he had some pretty weird friends.

.

Sunday morning found the three of them tangled up on Clint's way-too-small bed, woken up from a particularly loud bang of thunder and bright flash of lighting. Tony's eyes shot open, but any flashbacks were immediately stopped because what he was lying on something soft, Natasha's arm was slung over his shoulders, back against his other friend's, and he could clearly hear rain against the window. And the awesome part about _that_ was that it doesn't rain in the desert, and this was officially his new favorite type of weather.

He was eye to eye to Natasha and after a moment of doing nothing, she suddenly started laughing (or more like giggling, but she'd kill him if he ever pointed that out), followed by Clint sitting up, at little dazed, and Tony by this point had no idea what was going on. They sat up too, and she said, "Who knew a movie about a killer tire could act like a tranquilizer?"

Clint shrugged. "Wasn't have bad, either. I—"

Before he could finish, Tony cut in, "I call first shower!" causing a glare and a mumble as he headed out. He'd barely slept since that day with the anti-anxiety medication, and even though it had probably only been about five hours, that was five hours _straight_, and he felt better than he had in a while.

He traded off showers with Clint, who then traded off with Natasha and proceeded to look for breakfast as Tony stayed away from everything. He could use the toaster and the microwave, but his friends determined that he had to stay away from gas stove and gas oven because he would undoubtedly find a way to kill anything that was not electric. How, he wasn't exactly sure, but he knew he could probably do it anyway and decided it was in everyone's best interest for him to just never go near anything.

"I'm so not going out today," Natasha said when she joined him at the table, wearing a pair of Batman shorts and shirt that Tony was pretty sure was his, as Clint set down eggs and coffee (he worked as a waiter for a while, so he could balance everything like professional) and half-flopped into the chair. "Aw, thank you, wifey."

"You do realize that would make you hubby or whatever it's called, right?"

"So? Always knew I wore the pants in this relationship."

As Clint threw a stray pencil at her face, whacking her in the forehead, Tony asked, "Wait, then what would I be?"

Simultaneously, "The kid."

"Can't I be the awkward neighbor or something?"

Natasha shook her head and stabbed her eggs with a fork. "Nope," Clint answered. "Totally the kid. But I'm still not the female here. I'm too awesome for that."

"I want ketchup," she said. "I heard it's good, but I've never tried it. Why don't we have ketchup again?"

What the fuck were they even talking about, Tony had to wonder, but he really didn't care. "Because none of us like tomatoes until it involves French fries or pizza," he said. "That sounds gross, anyway. Ketchup and _eggs_?" She shrugged. "God, you're weird."

Finishing his plate, Clint pointed out, "And _you_ don't eat unless we remind you, so I don't really think you have the right to talk. According to your mom, you also ate cream cheese and peanut butter sandwiches when you were like six, which sounds a lot worse."

"Wait—what? How do you know that?"

The smirk Natasha sent his way could be described as nothing short of evil. After finishing her breakfast too, she gathered their dishes in a decidedly wife-like way the Clint proceeded to point out. All it earned him was a smack on the head and Tony a glare because naturally he had the audacity to snicker. He asked, "When's it supposed to stop?"

Rather than either of his friends, JARVIS answered, "_Not until nine, sir, though weather men have a tendency to be incorrect._"

"Thanks, JARVIS," he said as Clint frowned. "What?"

"Finally found a way to get on the roof," he said, and Tony remembered that he'd been looking for it for a while, since they was one of the reasons they got the top apartment anyway. Not that any of them really minded heights anyway and back in New York they used to chill at his place all the time. "Wanted to finally check it out, but guess that isn't happening until this stops. And I definitely don't want to just sit around today. You inventing anything right now, Tony?"

He finished his last project two days ago—something for school that took about half an hour and Erskine told him that the recent switch in his medication was going to screw with his creativity for about a week so he was coming up with blanks—and shook his head. Natasha came back over, sitting down, and said, "We can play cards or something and make s'mores with the stove because, come on, how have we _not _thought of that yet?"

Eating more than about a meal a day was unusual for him, but he'd dropped three of the four pounds he'd gotten back so something sugary probably wasn't the worst idea in the world. "Later for the s'mores," he said before seeing that the clock about the microwave said it was a little after noon already.

"'Course," she said. "Chocolate and marshmallows after eggs is worse than my mom's attempts at Spanish cooking. Hey, do we have the ingredients for it anyway?"

Obviously saddened, Clint answered, "No."

"I'll go out and get it!" Tony said quickly because being out in the rain for even the ten minutes to took to get to and from the market sounded fun.

"_You'll catch a cold, sir_."

"Quiet, JARVIS, I'll be fine."

With a frown, Natasha said, "You're so not going on your own. Clint, go with him."

"What?"

"I just conditioned my hair, I'm not going to get it wet with rain water!"

His friend shrugged, not having much of a problem with it, and about seven minutes or so later, the two of them were in the small, family-owned market, soaking wet despite having theirs hoods flipped up because it wasn't like they owned any umbrellas. There was an incredibly bored looking girl behind the counter who brightened noticeably when she saw them.

"Hey!" she said, ringing up the marshmallows, Hershey's chocolate, gram crackers, and coffee like it was totally normal for two guys to come in buying ingredients for s'more when the sky was practicing for the apocalypse. "You're that Anthony Stark kid, right?" After a moment where he didn't answer, trying to figure out how this girl would know him by his full name, she added, "We have Hammer's and Selvig's classes together. Just, you know, you sleep through one and I sit behind you in my uncle's class, so I guess I shouldn't _really _be surprised that you don't know who I am. Jane Forster, by the way."

"I prefer Tony," he answered, watching her bag the stuff. "I remember your name from roll call first day. This is my roommate—"

"Clint Barton," his friend said. "I go to Suffolk. Freshman or sophomore?"

"Sophomore," she said. "Freshman?" He nodded. "I thought Suffolk had compulsory dorming. Total's seven fifty-six."

As Tony handed over a ten, Clint said, "If they did, then they got rid of it. Nice to meet you, Jane."

"You too," she answered and the three of the them exchanged goodbyes before the boys left and Tony could properly make fun of his friend because he finally realized that Clint was right, and his social skills really were that bad.

.

Like I said, last chance to suggest pairings.


End file.
